Beagle Search Web Interface Help

### Open Result Links

Browsers run AJAX applications such as the Beagle webinterface within a restricted environment, and hence the webinterface cannot directly access the contents of any of the files on your computer without your permission. To give the webinterface permission to access your files, follow the instructions below for your browser:

- Mozilla Firefox

  (See MozillaZine:Links to local pages do not work for detailed explanation)

  Due to the above mentioned security feature, the browser takes no action when the links in the results are clicked. You can disable the security feature for only the links obtained from the webinterface by putting the following three lines into a file called `user.js` and placing it in your firefox profile directory.

      user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
      user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "http://localhost:4000");
      user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled", "allAccess");

  With these lines in place, the browser will open the respective file when a search result link is clicked.

### Search Syntax

Beagle supports a search syntax similar to the major search engines you are probably familiar with. If you see too many results for a query, consider refining your search.

- Required words: By default, Beagle will return results containing all of the words you specify, with the exception of common "stop words" such as "a", "the", and "is".

- Phrases: To search for specific phrases (one word next to another), place the words in quotation marks. For example:

    `"White Album"`

- Partial words: Beagle supports partial word searches using asterisks as wildcards. For example, to find words like "black", "blackbird", and "blacksmith":

    `black*`

- Excluding words: To exclude a word or phrase from your search, prefix it with minus sign ("-"). For example, to find items with "Beatles" but not the word "George":

    `Beatles -George`

- Optional words: To indicate that the word A or word B be in results, use `OR`, i.e. to find items which contain either "George" or "Ringo" (or both). The `OR` is case-sensitive.

    `George OR Ringo`

- Date queries: (Added post 0.2.16) Beagle allows querying for items with a particular date or within a date range. The queries look like

    `date:d1` | On date d1
    `date:d1-d2` | From date d1 to d2, both inclusive
    `date:-d2` | On or before date d2
    `date:d1-` | On or after date d1

    where, d1 and d2 are specified as

    - Year with 4 digits
        `date:2007` denotes year 2007
    - YearMonth with 4 digits year, 2 digits month
        `date:200612-2007` denotes the range December, 2006 to end of 2007
    - YearMonthDate with 4 digits year, 2 digits month and 2 digits date
        `date:-20050119` denotes any date on and upto 19th January, 2005

- Searching file extensions: You can use either `*.mp3` or `ext:mp3` to search for documents by file extension. (In this example, MP3s.)

- Uri queries: You can retrieve all indexed metadata about a particular URI. For file paths, remember to correctly convert it to a URI (by escaping certain characters and using file:// as the prefix). This can be used for any URI indexed by beagle e.g. URIs for email results, for browsing history, for notes etc.

    `uri:file:///home/user/somefile`
    `uri:http://beagle-project.org`
    `uri:knotes:///abcd`

- Property queries: By default, Beagle looks for your search terms in the text of the documents and their metadata. If you want to search for a specific property, use the format `property:keyword`. Property queries follow all the rules mentioned above; so you can search for properties by phrase, using wildcards, exclude terms, or provide optional terms. For example, the following query will return all of your Beatles MP3s or Ogg/Vorbis files that aren't on the Abbey Road album:

    `artist:Beatles ext:mp3 OR ext:ogg -album:"Abbey Road"`

    Beagle allows additional filters and backends to be written as plugins. These plugins might define additional properties for querying. You can find a list of supported properties by running `beagle-query --keywords`. Here is a list of properties defined in beagle:

    property | applies to | description
    --- | --- | ---
    title | Document | Title of document, mapped to dc:title e.g. title tag of HTML files
    creator | Document | Creator of the document, mapped to dc:creator e.g. creator of PDF files
    author | Document | Author of the document
    summary | File | Brief description of the content, mapped to dc:subject
    artist | Music file | Name of artist
    album | Music file | Name of album
    genre | Music file | Genre of music
    mailtoaddr | Email | Email address of receipient
    mailto | Email | Name of receipient
    mailfromaddr | Email | Email address of sender
    mailfrom | Email | Name of sender
    mailinglist | Email | Id of mailing list e.g. <dashboard-hackers.gnome.org>
    speakingto | Chat | Speaker
    email | Addressbook | Email address
    imagetag | Image file | IPTC keywords and F-Spot, Digikam image tags
    imagecomment | Image file | Comments and descriptions found in image including IPTC caption, Exif comment
    imagemodel | Jpeg image | Model of camera e.g. EOS2D
    inarchive | File | Use `inarchive:true` to search in archive contents
    inattachment | Email | Use `inattachment:true` to search in email attachments
    pkggroup | Package | Group to which the package belongs e.g. Configuration

- Improving search scope: Beagle indexes data of different kinds and from various sources. If you are getting too many results, you can improve the scope of your query by specifying the type or origin of the results. The syntax is similar to Property query. The meaning of source, hittype, filetype, mimetype is explained in Search Results.

    keyword | description
    --- | ---
    source | Source of the content e.g. `source:EvolutionDataServer` to search in EDS calendar and contact entries
    type | Hittype of the content e.g. `type:IMLog` to search in chat logs
    filetype | Specific type for file results e.g. `filetype:image` to search in image files
    mimetype | Mimetype of the content e.g. `mimetype:text/plain` to search in files with mime-type text/plain

  Expressions for date queries, extension queries, property queries, uri queries and limiting search scope can be used with - (to exclude all hits matching that expression) and OR (optional matching).

### More Help?

- Detailed help for Beagle
- Information about the Webinterface